Byron Scott on his sagging Cleveland Cavaliers: 'You'll find out what guys are really made of'

View full sizeChuck Crow / The Plain Dealer"They're confused," Byron Scott said of his struggling Cavaliers. "They're frustrated. They're searching as well. You've got a bunch of guys in here ... they're not used to this. There's always something good to come out of it, because you're going to find out what guys are really made of."

HOUSTON, Texas -- Byron Scott did not handle losing well as a player. Not that he'd had much practice -- until his career was winding down in Vancouver.

In the second-to-last year of his NBA playing career, when the Grizzlies lost 67 games under Brian Winters in the first season of their existence in 1995-96, he started drinking beers to cope.

"Coors Light, but still," he said, laughing at the memory. "I never drank beer until I got to Vancouver and we started losing."

One night, his wife, Anita, came downstairs about 2 a.m. to see Scott with three beers on the table.

"She said, 'Come to bed,'" Scott recalled. "I got into bed and I was just laying there and she said, 'Look. You want to be a coach, right? It's probably the best thing for you right now to understand what it means to lose. If you don't understand what it means to lose, how are you going to coach a team and they start losing games if you haven't been able to deal with it.' I was, like, 'Wow.' I told her that was right.

"I had never experienced anything like that, losing that much, losing almost every night. I never experienced anything like that. It helped me to understand the difference between losers and winners. There's a big difference. Playing in L.A. and Indiana, where you knew you were going to win every night, and then being on the other side, you could see why teams lost because of some of the guys they had in that locker room and their attitudes there toward playing basketball.

"I found out real soon the difference between losing and winning."

In spite of his team's losing streak, which reached seven on Saturday night in Houston with road games at Oklahoma City tonight and Miami on Wednesday, Scott still thinks he has a locker room full of winners.

"They're confused," he said. "They're frustrated. They're searching as well. You've got a bunch of guys in here ... they're not used to this. There's always something good to come out of it, because you're going to find out what guys are really made of. I think that's important, especially for a franchise that's trying to move forward.

"It's important for us to find out which guys we have in this locker room are going to stand pat. It's great when it's going well. Everybody's great when it's going well. But when it's going bad, you really find out what you have."

Actually, lots of players in the locker room have gone through really, really bad seasons, starting with Antawn Jamison, who spent last season in Washington, where the Wizards went into free fall after Gilbert Arenas' suspension in the wake of his gun incident and would up winning just 26 games.

When asked if this season was getting that bad, Jamison said, "It's not quite there yet. But it's not quite the same. We still can compete. It's not like a major injury has happened to certain players or anything like that. In those situations, it just seemed like there was nothing positive that could come out of anything. In this situation, we're just hitting a major speed bump. We're trying to change a flat tire and we're taking our time with it."

As for the notion that the Cavs aren't used to this losing, while that may be the case in their time with Cleveland, six players other than Jamison have been on teams that won 31 or fewer games in a season. In Philadelphia his rookie season, Anthony Parker won 31 games in 1997-98. In Milwaukee, Mo Williams won 30 games in 2004-05 and 28 in 2006-07, and Ramon Sessions won 26 in 2007-08. In Toronto, Joey Graham won 27 games in 2005-06. In Boston in 2006-07, Leon Powe won 24 games. But Ryan Hollins owns the record for mental torture on this team after suffering through a 15-67 season.

Powe's Celtics lost 18 in a row. Asked how he coped, he said, "All we did was we leaned on each other and worked it out and figured out how we were going to solve the problem. ... It was one of the worst times in my life, but things could have been worse. But 18 in a row, you don't want to do that. This little stretch right now, it's a bad stretch, but it's up to us to correct it, the coaches, the players, and just figure out what we need to do little by little to kind of eliminate some of the mistakes we've been making."

He said in some ways, the Cavs' recent stretch has been worse than the 18-game losing streak.

"The only thing with the 18-game stretch, we were in all the games," he said. "We were right there, we just didn't know how to close a game out.

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